There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.
On the other hand:
the clocks just tell time
your user directory isn’t stored in a data center 1500 miles away
the update process understands the concept of consent, and;
you can create a local user account during install without … whatever this is.
I’m old, and can’t be fucked learning a whole new system. I just want to browse the internet and play my games. The biggest barrier is getting my simracing gear and modded Assetto Corsa working on it.
Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I’m a sysadmin.
It’s only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it “just works*” and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.
It’s not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.
I’m not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn’t pay me commissions. Windows isn’t THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.
I’ve just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.
The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock force-quantum 256
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.
OK, so tell me how to get Assetto Corsa Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch and all the other mods I have installed, Quest 2 VR and Moza Pit House working in Linux, because that’s the thing keeping me from switching. Would WINE work well enough for that?
The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.
The core weird trick is understanding that there’s a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that’s essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it’s running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.
So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way… But you use the directory, that contains the “C drive” for that specific game.
It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it’ll feel familiar. You just now have a unique “C drive” directory for each game.
You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they’re both running on the same computer.
For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it’s all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.
That approach doesn’t work for any game, tho. For example, I can’t get mods working for World of Tanks. If I move the mid files in the directory where they normally would be under Windows, WoT crashes when I start it.
For the method that you’re using, you could enable proton logging and that would let you see the traceback of the crash. It may give you a bit more information about what it was trying to do when it crashed.
I’d switch if every discussion about Linux didn’t devolve into lengthy discussions about the complicated ways you need get anything working on it.
Fair.
There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.
On the other hand:
I’m old, and can’t be fucked learning a whole new system. I just want to browse the internet and play my games. The biggest barrier is getting my simracing gear and modded Assetto Corsa working on it.
Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I’m a sysadmin.
It’s only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it “just works*” and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.
It’s not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.
I’m not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn’t pay me commissions. Windows isn’t THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.
I’ve just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.
Obligatory “Gnome is NOT Mac-like” comment.
The Windows people think Gnome is Mac-like. Hah, no it’s not! Gnome is its own weird thing.
KDE can actually get a lot closer to Mac than Gnome can, if you add a top menu bar, rearrange some stuff, and move the titlebar buttons around.
(We came from Mac land originally, and that’s how we have our KDE set up. Mostly.)
– Frost
For most popular distros most stuff works out of the gate. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wrestle with anything vexing.
The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.
That depends on the distro, just choose one that’s beginner-friendly or “works out of the box”
LMDE, Zorin, etc.
Linux Mint is also great for new users.
OK, so tell me how to get Assetto Corsa Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch and all the other mods I have installed, Quest 2 VR and Moza Pit House working in Linux, because that’s the thing keeping me from switching. Would WINE work well enough for that?
I’ll legit look into this tomorrow.
The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.
The core weird trick is understanding that there’s a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that’s essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it’s running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.
So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way… But you use the directory, that contains the “C drive” for that specific game.
It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it’ll feel familiar. You just now have a unique “C drive” directory for each game.
You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they’re both running on the same computer.
For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it’s all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.
That approach doesn’t work for any game, tho. For example, I can’t get mods working for World of Tanks. If I move the mid files in the directory where they normally would be under Windows, WoT crashes when I start it.
For WOT/WOWS you should be ablt to run Aslains modpack installer inside of the wine prefix with protontricks: https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks
For the method that you’re using, you could enable proton logging and that would let you see the traceback of the crash. It may give you a bit more information about what it was trying to do when it crashed.
Not true. Standard Debian install on Thinkpad takes 15 Minutes. I don’t need more words.
How long can a discussion be about pressing a button to install a thing from the package manager, then launch said thing?